Long Beach unveils final renderings of future Belmont Plaza Pool

The City of Long Beach hosted a community meeting to unveil what are said to be the final renderings for the Belmont Plaza Pool. This project has been in the works for over a decade and has undergone multiple iterations.

Former plans included a nearly $120M domed, Olympics-worthy pool in 2016. And a 2021 proposal that included separate recreational, diving, and competitive pools. Mired in ballooning costs and regulatory issues—the powerful Californian Coastal Commission will ultimately dictate what can and can be built on our coastline, including this very pool—the City believes it has settled on a much less ambitious but far more realistic replacement to the historic Belmont Plaza Pool that was demolished in 2014.

The new Belmont Plaza Pool: What the final proposal looks like.

Two outdoor pool will be the highlight of the new Belmont Plaza Pool. One regulation-sized with the ability to also host polo and another shallow pool for toddlers and families. Adding to this will be functional features: bathrooms, changing rooms, lockers… And administration spaces: offices, a multi-purpose room, and staff support spaces.

Sustainability features of the Belmont Plaza Pool.

According to the City, the new pool will have a clear foci on sustainability measures and implementations, including:

• Energy efficient equipment for conditioning of indoor spaces and pool water.
• Water conservation measure including efficient plumbing fixtures and drought tolerant landscape reducing need for irrigation.
• Water and energy efficient state-of-the-art pool equipment.
• Use of recycled materials.
• Use of efficient lighting fixtures including LED technology.
• Management of site lighting pollution sources.

The history of the previous, demolished pool is a rich one.

When the Belmont Plaza Olympic Pool was dedicated on August 15, 1968, it was Long Beach’s most exuberant embrace of aquatic sports since it had first ran the Men’s Olympic Swim Trials in 1932 at the Colorado Lagoon. Come 15 days later, the Olympic preliminary trials began.

The $3.7M Belmont Plaza Olympic Pool stretches for 240 feet along the coast of Long Beach, just east of the Belmont Pier. Housed in a facility that used to sit some 2,700 spectators, the pool itself was a marvel at the time it opened: one million gallons filled an all-tile, 8-lane pool that stretched 50 meters long, nearly 23 meters wide, and hit a depth of over 5 meters deep.

It was even equipped with underwater television and sound equipment while boasting of then-extraordinary electronic scoring and timing apparatuses.